Part 5

Chapter 4

AND the troop went off over the flat plain, white
with frost beneath the pale winter sun, and
overflowed the path as they passed through the
beetroot fields.

From the Fourche-aux-Boeufs, Étienne had
assumed command. He cried his orders while the
crowd moved on, and organized the march. Jeanlin
galloped at the head, performing barbarous music
on his horn. Then the women came in the first
ranks, some of them armed with sticks: Maheude,
with wild eyes seemed to be seeking afar for the
promised city of justice, Mother Brulé, the
Levaque woman, Mouquette, striding along beneath
their rags, like soldiers setting out for the seat
of war. If they had any encounters, we should see
if the police dared to strike women. And the men
followed in a confused flock, a stream that grew
larger and larger, bristling with iron bars and
dominated by Levaque's single axe, with its blade
glistening in the sun. Étienne, in the
middle, kept Chaval in sight, forcing him to walk
before him; while Maheu, behind, gloomily kept an
eye on Catherine, the only woman among these men,
obstinately trotting near her lover for fear that
he would be hurt. Bare heads were dishevelled in
the air; only the clank of sabots could be heard,
like the movement of released cattle, carried away
by Jeanlin's wild trumpeting.

But suddenly a new cry arose:

"Bread! bread! bread!"

It was midday; the hunger of six weeks on strike
was awaking in these empty stomachs, whipped up by
this race across the fields. The few crusts of
the morning and Mouquette's chestnuts had long
been forgotten; their stomachs were crying out,
and this suffering was added to their fury against
the traitors.

"To the pits! No more work! Bread!"

Étienne, who had refused to eat his share
at the settlement, felt an unbearable tearing
sensation in his chest. He made no complaint, but
mechanically took his tin from time to time and
swallowed a gulp of gin, shaking so much that he
thought he needed it to carry him to the end. His
cheeks were heated and his eyes inflamed. He kept
his head, however, and still wished to avoid
needless destruction.

As they arrived at the Joiselle road a Vandame
pike-man, who had joined the band for revenge on
his master, impelled the men towards the right,
shouting:

"To Gaston-Marie! Must stop the pump! Let
the water ruin Jean-Bart!"

The mob was already turning, in spite of the
protests of Étienne, who begged them to let
the pumping continue. What was the good of
destroying the galleries? It offended his
workman's heart, in spite of his resentment.
Maheu also thought it unjust to take revenge on a
machine. But the pikeman still shouted his cry of
vengeance, and Étienne had to cry still
louder:

"To Mirou! There are traitors down there!
To Mirou! to Mirou!"

With a gesture, he had turned the crowd towards
the left road; while Jeanlin, going ahead, was
blowing louder than ever. An eddy was produced in
the crowd; this time Gaston-Marie was saved.

And the four kilometres which separated them from
Mirou were traversed in half an hour, almost at
running pace, across the interminable plain. The
canal on this side cut it with a long icy ribbon.
The leafless trees on the banks, changed by the
frost into giant candelabra, alone broke this pale
uniformity, prolonged and lost in the sky at the
horizon as in a sea. An undulation of the ground
hid Montsou and Marchiennes; there was nothing but
bare immensity.

They reached the pit, and found a captain standing
on a footbridge at the screening-shed to receive
them. They all well knew Father Quandieu, the
doyen of the Montsou captains, an old man whose
skin and hair were quite white, and who was in his
seventies, a miracle of fine health in the mines.

"What have you come after here, you pack of
meddlers?" he shouted.

The band stopped. It was no longer a master, it
was a mate; and a certain respect held them back
before this old workman.

"There are men down below," said
Étienne. "Make them come up."

"Yes, there are men there," said Father
Quandieu, "some six dozen; the others were
afraid of you evil beggars! But I warn you that
not one comes up, or you will have to deal with
me!"

Exclamations arose, the men pushed, the women
advanced. Quickly coming down from the
footbridge, the captain now barred the door.

Then Maheu tried to interfere.

"It is our right, old man. How can we make
the strike general if we don't force all the mates
to be on our side?"

The old man was silent a moment. Evidently his
ignorance on the subject of coalition equalled the
pike-man's. At last he replied:

"It may be your right, I don't say. But I
only know my orders. I am alone here; the men are
down till three, and they shall stay there till
three."

The last words were lost in hooting. Fists were
threateningly advanced, the women deafened him,
and their hot breath blew in his face. But he
still held out, his head erect, and his beard and
hair white as snow; his courage had so swollen his
voice that he could be heard distinctly over the
tumult.

"By God! you shall not pass! As true as the
sun shines, I would rather die than let you touch
the cables. Don't push any more, or I'm damned if
I don't fling myself down the shaft before
you!"

The crowd drew back shuddering and impressed. He
went on:

"Where is the beast who does not understand
that? I am only a workman like you others. I
have been told to guard here, and I'm
guarding."

That was as far as Father Quandieu's intelligence
went, stiffened by his obstinacy of military duty,
his narrow skull, and eyes dimmed by the black
melancholy of half a century spent underground.
The men looked at him moved, feeling within them
an echo of what he said, this military obedience,
the sense of fraternity and resignation in danger.
He saw that they were hesitating still, and
repeated:

"I'm damned if I don't fling myself down the
shaft before you!"

A great recoil carried away the mob. They all
turned, and in the rush took the right-hand road,
which stretched far away through the fields.
Again cries arose:

"To Madelaine! To Crévecoeur! no
more work! Bread! bread!"

But in the centre, as they went on, there was
hustling. It was Chaval, they said, who was
trying to take advantage of an opportunity to
escape. Étienne had seized him by the arm,
threatening to do for him if he was planning some
treachery. And the other struggled and protested
furiously:

"What's all this for? Isn't a man free?
I've been freezing the last hour. I want to clean
myself. Let me go!"

He was, in fact, suffering from the coal glued to
his skin by sweat, and his woollen garment was no
protection.

"On you go, or we'll clean you," replied
Étienne. "Don't expect to get your
life at a bargain."

They were still running, and he turned towards
Catherine, who was keeping up well. It annoyed
him to feel her so near him, so miserable,
shivering beneath her man's old jacket and her
muddy trousers. She must be nearly dead of
fatigue, she was running all the same.

"You can go off, you can," he said at
last.

Catherine seemed not to hear. Her eyes, on
meeting Étienne's, only flamed with
reproach for a moment. She did not stop. Why did
he want her to leave her man? Chaval was not at
all kind, it was true; he would even beat her
sometimes. But he was her man, the one who had
had her first; and it enraged her that they should
throw themselves on him--more than a thousand of
them. She would have defended him without any
tenderness at all, out of pride.

"Off you go!" repeated Maheu, violently.

Her father's order slackened her course for a
moment. She trembled, and her eyelids swelled
with tears. Then, in spite of her fear, she came
back to the same place again, still running. Then
they let her be.

The mob crossed the Joiselle road, went a short
distance up the Cron road and then mounted towards
Cougny. On this side, factory chimneys striped
the flat horizon; wooden sheds, brick workshops
with large dusty windows, appeared along the
street. They passed one after another the low
buildings of two settlements--that of the
Cent-Quatre-Vingts, then that of the
Soixante-Seize; and from each of them, at the
sound of the horn and the clamour arising from
every mouth, whole families came out--men, women,
and children--running to join their mates in the
rear. When they came up to Madeleine there were
at least fifteen hundred. The road descended in a
gentle slope; the rumbling flood of strikers had
to turn round the pit-bank before they could
spread over the mine square.

It was now not more than two o'clock. But the
captains had been warned and were hastening the
ascent as the band arrived. The men were all up,
only some twenty remained and were now
disembarking from the cage. They fled and were
pursued with stones. Two were struck, another
left the sleeve of his jacket behind. This
man-hunt saved the material, and neither the
cables nor the boilers were touched. The flood
was already moving away, rolling on towards the
next pit.

This one, Crévecoeur, was only five hundred
metres away from Madeleine. There, also, the mob
arrived in the midst of the ascent. A putter-girl
was taken and whipped by the women with her
breeches split open and her buttocks exposed
before the laughing men. The trammer-boys had
their ears boxed, the pikemen got away, their
sides blue from blows and their noses bleeding.
And in this growing ferocity, in this old need of
revenge which was turning every head with madness,
the choked cries went on, death to traitors,
hatred against ill-paid work, the roaring of
bellies after bread. They began to cut the
cables, but the file would not bite, and the task
was too long now that the fever was on them for
moving onward, for ever onward. At the boilers a
tap was broken; while the water, thrown by
bucketsful into the stoves, made the metal
gratings burst.

Outside they were talking of marching on
Saint-Thomas. This was the best disciplined pit.
The strike had not touched it, nearly seven
hundred men must have gone down there. This
exasperated them; they would wait for these men
with sticks, ranged for battle, just to see who
would get the best of it. But the rumour ran
along that there were gendarmes at Saint-Thomas,
the gendarmes of the morning whom they had made
fun of. How was this known? nobody could say.
No matter! they were seized by fear and decided
on Feutry-Cantel. Their giddiness carried them
on, all were on the road, clanking their sabots,
rushing forward. To Feutry-Cantel! to
Feutry-Cantel! The cowards there were certainly
four hundred in number and there would be fun!
Situated three kilometres away, this pit lay in a
fold of the ground near the Scarpe. They were
already climbing the slope of the
Platriéres, beyond the road to Beaugnies,
when a voice, no one knew from whom, threw out the
idea that the soldiers were, perhaps, down there
at Feutry-Cantel. Then from one to the other of
the column it was repeated that the soldiers were
down there. They slackened their march, panic
gradually spread in the country, idle without
work, which they had been scouring for hours. Why
had they not come across any soldiers? This
impunity troubled them, at the thought of the
repression which they felt to be coming.

Without any one knowing where it came from, a new
word of command turned them towards another pit.

"To the Victoire! to the Victoire!"

Were there,, then, neither soldiers nor police at
the Victoire? Nobody knew. All seemed reassured.
And turning round they descended from the Beaumont
side and cut across the fields to reach the
Joiselle road. The railway line barred their
passage, and they crossed it, pulling down the
palings. Now they were approaching Montsou, the
gradual undulation of the landscape grew less, the
sea of beetroot fields enlarged, reaching far away
to the black houses at Marchiennes.

This time it was a march of five good kilometres.
So strong an impulse pushed them on that they had
no feeling of their terrible fatigue, or of their
bruised and wounded feet. The rear continued to
lengthen, increased by mates enlisted on the roads
and in the settlements. When they had passed the
canal at the Magache bridge, and appeared before
the Victoire, there were two thousand of them.
But three o'clock had struck, the ascent was
completed, not a man remained below. Their
disappointment was spent in vain threats; they
could only heave broken bricks at the workmen who
had arrived to take their duty at the
earth-cutting. There was a rush, and the deserted
pit belonged to them. And in their rage at not
finding a traitor's face to strike, they attacked
things. A rankling abscess was bursting within
them, a poisoned boil of slow growth. Years and
years of hunger tortured them with a thirst for
massacre and destruction. Behind a shed
Étienne saw some porters filling a wagon
with coal.

"Will you just clear out of the bloody
place!" he shouted. "Not a bit of coal
goes out!"

At his orders some hundred strikers ran up, and
the porters only had time to escape. Men
unharnessed the horses, which were frightened and
set off, struck in the haunches; while others,
overturning the wagon, broke the shafts.

Levaque, with violent blows of his axe, had thrown
himself on the platforms to break down the
footbridges. They resisted, and it occurred to
him to tear up the rails, destroying the line from
one end of the square to the other. Soon the
whole band set to this task. Maheu made the metal
chairs leap up, armed with his iron bar which he
used as a lever. During this time Mother
Brulé led away the women and invaded the
lamp cabin, where their sticks covered the soil
with a carnage of lamps. Maheude, carried out of
herself, was laying about her as vigorously as the
Levaque woman. All were soaked in oil, and
Mouquette dried her hands on her skirt, laughing
to find herself so dirty. Jeanlin for a joke, had
emptied a lamp down her neck. But all this
revenge produced nothing to eat. Stomachs were
crying out louder than ever. And the great
lamentation dominated still:

"Bread! bread! bread!"

A former captain at the Victoire kept a stall near
by. No doubt he had fled in fear, for his shed
was abandoned. When the women came back, and the
men had finished destroying the railway, they
besieged the stall, the shutters of which yielded
at once. They found no bread there; there were
only two pieces of raw flesh and a sack of
potatoes. But in the pillage they discovered some
fifty bottles of gin, which disappeared like a
drop of water drunk up by the sand.

Étienne, having emptied his tin, was able
to refill it. Little by little a terrible
drunkenness, the drunkenness of the starved, was
inflaming his eyes and baring his teeth like a
wolf's between his pallid lips. Suddenly he
perceived that Chaval had gone off in the midst of
the tumult. He swore, and men ran to seize the
fugitive, who was hiding with Catherine behind the
timber supply.

"Ah! you dirty swine; you are afraid of
getting into trouble!" shouted
Étienne. "It was you in the forest
who called for a strike of the engine-men, to stop
the pumps, and now you want to play us a filthy
trick! Very well! By God! we will go back to
Gaston-Marie. I will have you smash the pump;
yes, by God! you shall smash it!"

He was drunk; he was urging his men against this
pump which he had saved a few hours earlier.

"To Gaston-Marie! to Gaston-Marie!"

They all cheered, and rushed on, while Chaval,
seized by the shoulders, was drawn and pushed
violently along, while he constantly asked to be
allowed to wash.

"Will you take yourself off, then?"
cried Maheu to Catherine who had also begun to run
again.

This time she did not even draw back, but turned
her burning eyes on her father, and went on
running.

Once more the mob ploughed through the flat-plain.
They were retracing their steps over the long
straight paths, by the fields endlessly spread
out. It was four o'clock; the sun which
approached the horizon, lengthened the shadows of
this horde with their furious gestures over the
frozen soil.

They avoided Montsou, and farther on rejoined the
Joiselle road; to spare the journey round
Fourche-aux-Boeufs, they passed beneath the walls
of Piolaine. The Grégoires had just gone
out, having to visit a lawyer before going to dine
with the Hennebeaus, where they would find
Cécile. The estate seemed asleep, with its
avenue of deserted limes, its kitchen garden and
its orchard bared by the winter. Nothing was
stirring in the house, and the closed windows were
dulled by the warm steam within. Out of the
profound silence an impression of good-natured
comfort arose, the patriarchal sensation of good
beds and a good table, the wise happiness of the
proprietor's existence.

Without stopping, the band cast gloomy looks
through the grating and at the length of
protecting walls, bristling with broken bottles.
The cry arose again:

"Bread! bread! bread!"

The dogs alone replied, by barking ferociously, a
pair of Great Danes, with rough coats, who stood
with open jaws. And behind the closed blind there
were only the servants. Mélanie the cook
and Honorine the housemaid, attracted by this cry,
pale and perspiring with fear at seeing these
savages go by. They fell on their knees, and
thought themselves killed on hearing a single
stone breaking a pane of a neighbouring window.
It was a joke of Jeanlin's; he had manufactured a
sling with a piece of cord, and had just sent a
little passing greeting to the Grégoires.
Already he was again blowing his horn, the band
was lost in the distance, and the cry grew
fainter:

"Bread! bread! bread!"

They arrived at Gaston-Marie in still greater
numbers, more than two thousand five hundred
madmen, breaking everything, sweeping away
everything, with the force of a torrent which
gains strength as it moves. The police had passed
here an hour earlier, and had gone off towards
Saint-Thomas, led astray by some peasants; in
their haste they had not even taken the precaution
of leaving a few men behind to guard the pit. In
less than a quarter of an hour the fires were
overturned, the boilers emptied, the buildings
torn down and devastated. But it was the pump
which they specially threatened. It was not
enough to stop it in the last expiring breath of
its steam; they threw themselves on it as on a
living person whose life they required.

"The first blow is yours!" repeated
Étienne, putting a hammer into Chaval's
hand. "Come! you have sworn with the
others!"

Chaval drew back trembling, and in the hustling
the hammer fell; while other men, without waiting,
battered the pump with blows from iron bars, blows
from bricks, blows from anything they could lay
their hands on. Some even broke sticks over it.
The nuts leapt off, the pieces of steel and copper
were dislocated like torn limbs. The blow of a
shovel, delivered with full force, fractured the
metal body; the water escaped and emptied itself,
and there was a supreme gurgle like an agonizing
death-rattle.

That was the end, and the mob found themselves
outside again, madly pushing on behind
Étienne, who would not let Chaval go.

"Kill him! the traitor! To the shaft! to
the shaft!"

The livid wretch, clinging with imbecile obstinacy
to his fixed idea, continued to stammer his need
of cleaning himself.

"Wait, if that bothers you, said the Levaque
woman. "Here! here's a bucket?"

There was a pond there, an infiltration of the
water from the pump. It was white with a thick
layer of ice; and they struck it and broke the
ice, forcing him to dip his head in this cold
water.

"Duck then," repeated Mother
Brulé. "By God! if you don't duck
we'll shove you in. And now you shall have a
drink of it; yes, yes, like a beast, with your
jaws in the trough!"

He had to drink on all fours. They all laughed,
with cruel laughter. One woman pulled his ears,
another woman threw in his face a handful of dung
found fresh on the road. His old woollen jacket
in tatters no longer held together. He was
haggard, stumbling, and with struggling movements
of his hips he tried to flee.

Maheu had pushed him, and Maheude was among those
who grew furious, both of them satisfying their
old spite; even Mouquette, who generally remained
such good friends with her old lovers, was wild
with this one, treating him as a good-for-nothing,
and talking of taking his breeches down to see if
he was still a man.

Étienne made her hold her tongue.

"That's enough. There's no need for all to
set to it. If you like, you, we will just settle
it together."

His fists closed and his eyes were lit up with
homicidal fury; his intoxication was turning into
the desire to kill.

"Are you ready? One of us must stay here.
Give him a knife; I've got mine."

Catherine, exhausted and terrified, gazed at him.
She remembered his confidences, his desire to
devour a man when he had drunk, poisoned after the
third glass, to such an extent had his drunkards
of parents put this beastliness into his body.
Suddenly she leapt forward, struck him with both
her woman's hands, and choking with indignation
shouted into his face:

"Coward! coward! coward! Isn't it enough,
then, all these abominations? You want to kill
him now that he can't stand upright any
longer!"

She turned towards her father and her mother; she
turned towards the others.

"You are cowards! cowards! Kill me, then,
with him! I will tear your eyes out, I will, if
you touch him again. Oh! the cowards!"

And she planted herself before her man to defend
him, forgetting the blows, forgetting the life of
misery, lifted up by the idea that she belonged to
him since he had taken her, and that it was a
shame for her when they so crushed him.

Étienne had grown pale beneath this girl's
blows. At first he had been about to knock her
down; then, after having wiped his face with the
movement of a man who is recovering from
intoxication, he said to Chaval, in the midst of
deep silence:

"She is right; that's enough. Off you
go."

Immediately Chaval was away, and Catherine
galloped behind him. The crowd gazed at them as
they disappeared round a corner of the road; but
Maheude muttered:

"You were wrong; ought to have kept him. He
is sure to be after some treachery."

But the mob began to march on again. Five o'clock
was about to strike. The sun, as red as a furnace
on the edge of the horizon, seemed to set fire to
the whole plain. A pedlar who was passing
informed them that the military were descending
from the Crévecoeur side. Then they
turned. An order ran: